Locating the Past/Discovering the Present: Perspectives on Religion, Culture, and Marginality (review)

Locating the Past/Discovering the Present: Perspectives on Religion, Culture, and Marginality is, as its title suggests, a diverse collection of essays that explore the intersection of religion and culture as they are lived out on the margins of social orthodoxy. In the introduction, David Gay and Stephen R. Reimer assert that ‘the central goal of the collection’ is to ‘examine how religious ideas, themes, and images, emanating from different times and locations, undergo new forms of production, interpretation, and recreation in other historical and cultural settings.’ In order to bring their project into focus, Gay and Reimer define the unifying terms of this collection in their introduction. Marginality, they argue, ‘is not an assumed or fixed idea in this collection; it is a function of the different perspectives the writers provide,’ and as such, this book is ‘ultimately a collective effort to discern through comparative perspectives the continuing influence of religion on culture, and the interplay between religious influences and cultural productions.’ Culture is loosely defined as ‘the semiotic focus of cultural studies,’ that is, the collection as a whole derives much of its rationale from Clifford Geertz’s articulation of culture as ‘webs of significance’ that men and women themselves have spun. Already, with these two framing perspectives, one can see both the strength and the drawback of this collection: the essays cover a broad range of topics, academic disciplines, historical time periods, and geopolitical locations. Certainly they represent the cross-cultural and transhistorical significance of religious ideas, images, narratives, and practices that occupy the ‘margins’ of various dominant cultures; as a whole collection, however, it is at times jarring to move so decisively between time periods, locations, and academic disciplines. Yet this is also, perhaps paradoxically, one of this collection’s greatest strengths. By refusing to remain focused on the religious marginality of any one particular historical period, any one particular religion, or any one particular nation, this text itself enacts a meta-cultural marginality of its own. As Gay and Reimer assert, this book affirms a ‘basic sense of marginality as a phenomenon “relating to an edge, border, boundary, or limit”’ which ‘suggests the full range of possibilities that the writers in this volume claim.’ The marginality explored within each essay of this book is reflected in the project of the collection as a whole: ‘Edges, boundaries, borders, and limits become sites for what Stuart Hall calls “the production and exchange of meanings.”’ Religion is the overriding topic that links this disparate collection together. Again, in the introduction Gay and Reimer emphasize religion’s unifying perspective. Giving a brief etymology of religion, they suggest that religion ‘carries the sense of “mooring”’ and also ‘can be a form of “binding together” the diverse parts of the self, the community, the culture.’ To this effect, the book achieves its goal of demonstrating the central position that religion has had across space and time in cultural hegemonies and on the margins.

The essays in this collection offer valuable insights into the fluid relationship between religion and culture and into the prominent position religion has played in global cultures throughout the centuries. As explorations of religious and cultural phenomena of the margins, the essays are narrow in focus, and yet their specificity is entirely balanced by their approachable and straightforward style. This is a valuable book for scholars and students alike, and indeed for non-specialists who have an interest in cultural studies.